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You’ll see that pattern where a plugin (perhaps defined in buildSrc) applies a 3rd party plugin, requiring the class files to both apply the plugin and likely configure it. Plugin versions are needed where they are applied - if you have multiple locations applying plugins (plugins applying plugins, subprojects applying plugins, etc) may need to look at pulling all those into convention plugins and applying plugins in a uniform way, and from there looking to standardize version management.

Yes, you can use a version catalog of the parent build in

buildSrc/build.gradle(.kts)

by importing it in the

buildSrc/settings.gradle(.kts)

.

Fwiw, I've been using a helper function to generate the plugin marker coordinates from the plugin ID for a while:

dependencies {
    implementation(plugin(id = "com.diffplug.spotless", version = "5.14.1"))
}
// <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/plugins.html#sec:plugin_markers>
fun plugin(id: String, version: String) = "$id:$id.gradle.plugin:$version"

and am now using version catalogs with a similar function:

dependencies {
    implementation(plugin(libs.plugins.spotless))
}
// <https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/17963>
// <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/plugins.html#sec:plugin_markers>
fun plugin(plugin: Provider<PluginDependency>) = plugin.map { "${it.pluginId}:${it.pluginId}.gradle.plugin:${it.version}" }

@Thomas Broyer Looks useful, thanks! Does it work with any plugin? For example the SpotBugs Gradle plugin is using a different pattern: https://plugins.gradle.org/plugin/com.github.spotbugs

dependencies {
  classpath "com.github.spotbugs.snom:spotbugs-gradle-plugin:5.0.6"
}

id "com.github.spotbugs" version "5.0.6"

It works with every single plugin as that's how Gradle does it when you use

plugins { id("com.github.spotbugs") }

(see the link in comment next to the function). The thing is, that plugin marker artifact is only a POM that depends on the actual artifact of the plugin: https://plugins.gradle.org/m2/com/github/spotbugs/com.github.spotbugs.gradle.plugin/5.0.6/com.github.spotbugs.gradle.plugin-5.0.6.pom

@Thomas Broyer that function only works if the plugin id is following a concrete naming convention no?

No. As soon as it's usable with the plugins DSL, this is how Gradle resolves it itself (and if it's not usable with the plugins DSL, you already know exactly which Maven coordinates to use)

It's also independent of the coordinates of the actual code jar. Because one code jar could contain multiple plugins. That's why the plugin marker artifacts are separate.